Helping your Child Learn to Read

I feel as a parent that it is crucial for our children to learn to read at an early age. I know that some parents don't think about their child learning to read until around first grade of school. My thoughts are that the schools alone can't teach our children to read. It takes so much more in this day and time. Parents need to get involved with their child's reading at am early age. I feel starting them at the age of four is a great age. As any parent we want our children to strive to be their best in school. If we as parent s don't start getting more involved then our children are going to fall behind in school. Before your child starts school they need to recognize their alphabet, and know their basic sight words. Teach your child their alphabet. Then your child needs some time everyday to have a chance to see these basic sight words. Ten minutes a day is about all you can get out of a four year old but that is all they need. After seeing those words enough they will pick up on them and begin to show it. I feel even on weekends is important. They need this every single day for them to learn. I have 5 children. I practiced this with every one of them but my last one. He was a sick baby and I just didn't push him to learn those words. Now he is in kindergarten and he is behind the rest of the class. I also volunteer in his class and these teachers are expected to do so much and they can not get to these sight words but maybe once a week. This is why it is so imperative to go over these sight words with your little ones. If they learn them at age four then they won't have a problem when the teacher can't get to the words on a daily basis at school. Mom and dad are there to help out at home. I have found if you take the sight words and put each word on an index card and go over these words daily with your child is the best method for learning. Make it fun. Once your child has the basic words down to where they can look at the word and within 3 seconds (this is the limit set by most school systems) tell you what the word is they can go on to reading beginner books. You can take your child to the local library and allow them to pick out beginner books that they would want to read. Replace the time that you had set aside for the sight words with reading these books. While letting your child read with your help, ask your child to point to the words while they are reading. This helps in recognizing words as they read also known as sight reading. I know that it doesn't seem like much but this method helps out allot. These are just a few things that we as parents can do to help get our children on the right path of learning and having a better education. If a child gets discouraged while learning it becomes more of a task to them and not fun. They will then try to steer away from the learning process all together. So try to make learning as fun as possible. If your child messes up let them know that it is okay to mess up, that is why it is called learning. Below you should find a link that will send you to a list of basic sight words.